Fundamentals of Management, 11/e

How Can an Understanding of Attitudes Help Managers Be More Effective?

Managers should be interested in their employees’ attitudes because they influence behavior in the following ways:

1. Satisfied and committed employees have lower rates of turnover and absenteeism. If managers want to keep resignations and absences down—-especially among their more productive employees—they’ll want to do things that generate positive job attitudes.

2. Whether satisfied workers are productive workers is a debate that’s been going on for almost 80 years. After the Hawthorne studies (see p. 33 in the Management History Module), managers believed that happy workers were productive workers. Because it’s not easy to determine whether job satisfaction “caused” job productivity ...